Digital Society Institute

- the former Research Institute CTIT is now part of the Digital Society Institute, this website is still under construction -

The digital society of today is just a first step toward what we can expect in the near future. Today, we are connected, our surroundings are connected. We are more than just consumers of digitalization, we are also suppliers of the data that drives much of the digitalization. We welcome technology that makes autonomous decisions about our lives, yet also fear loss of control.

Seamless integration

The current trend in digitalization in which data science, autonomous decision making, and artificial intelligence play essential roles, will continue, often beyond our imagination. As individuals, we will be confronted with a seamless integration with a digital environment consisting of a myriad of devices many of which their existence we are often barely aware of. This environment will sense our behavior and act upon it. As a society, we will be witnessing many decisions by autonomous processes that have largely replaced the human experts of today. Diagnostics, regardless in which domain, will be based on massive amounts of data and advanced analytics, often operated as a black box to corporate management and governmental policy-makers. Robots, be they hard or soft, will have invaded our societies in all its appearances and variations.

New skills and awareness

In the digital society, simply keeping up with developments may often be close to impossible. Individuals, organizations, industry, goverments and the like will have developed new skills to rapidly adopt new digital technologies, and use new technologies to develop and adopt new skills. At the same time, a much sharper awareness of what we want and deem acceptable will be shaping the technologies we are effectively willing to adopt, in turn steering and crafting the development of those digital technologies in and by everyday life.